B ruce Weiner started out selling antique gumball machines at a Toronto flea market. That got him into the bubble gum business and left him with a lot of loose change. He now has one of the most unique dream garages in the world, with collections ranging from the rarest of Supercars, to 270 "Bubble Cars", micro vehicles that filled the streets of Europe after WWII.

Bruce's passion for collecting goes well beyond vehicles; his garage can't help but inspire a desire to collect in just about anyone privileged enough to be invited inside.

B ruce Weiner collects in the extreme and at the extremes of the hobby, with a bi-polar assembly of modern day Supercars and ancient German bubble cars dating from a half-century ago. His massive home garages are monuments to the modern supercar, housing a McLaren F1, Ford GT, Ferrari Enzo, Lamborghini Murcielago Roadster, and various others. But at car shows and elsewhere, it’s Bruce’s bubble car collection that garners the most attention. You see, any well-to-do gentleman can buy an Enzo, but it takes a special man to own – and drive – a Messerschmitt.

In 1992, Bruce Weiner saw an ad offering a Messerschmitt for sale in Hemmings Motor News. “I used to read Hemmings cover to cover,” he says. “In one issue I saw this little picture of a Messerschmitt three-wheeler. I had never heard of the car, much less seen one, but it intrigued me and I wanted to know more about it.”

The car’s owner lived in Oklahoma, and Weiner talked to him on the phone for almost three hours before agreeing to buy it, sight unseen, for $8,000. Two weeks later, the Messerschmitt arrived on the back of a truck. Weiner quickly found he had a lot to learn about the car somebody once called, “The perfect answer to a question nobody asked.”

Weiner smiles. “I didn’t know how to start it, or even if it would start. I didn’t know how to put it in gear. I really didn’t know anything about that strange little car I bought.”

After World War II ended much of Europe, England and Japan lay in ruins.

As people began to rebuild their lives, there was an urgent need for transportation, but money, manufacturing facilities, raw materials and gasoline were in short supply.

In the late 1940s, the micro cars, or as they are better known, 'bubble cars' (so called because many of them featured curved Plexiglas roofs and windows), began to appear on the road. They were built by innovative designers who had reinvented the automobile for those austere times.

Frisky, Bond, Inter, Spatz, Rovin, Scootacar, Kleinschnittger, Isetta, Biscuter, Fuldamolbile, Heinkel and Peel. These are names that are known today largely by those who study the history of the automobile, or those old enough to remember seeing the tiny machines scooting down the street trailing a plume of bluish, two-stroke smoke. The micro car era lasted only a decade, but during that time some of the most interesting and bizarre cars that ever ran on the world’s highways were produced.

Today, Weiner knows a great deal more about these automotive oddities than he did in 1992. His collection now numbers 270 and is the world’s largest collection of the little vehicles. These are housed in a 25,000 square-foot building on Weiner’s farm in Madison, Georgia, a small town fifty miles east of Atlanta. The garage is a huge affair, substantial, built entirely of brick.

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